Min Wenshui

However, setting the boundaries between different social classes was not always the case. The commoners with outstanding sensual sensitivity and excellent expertise in water tasting and tea drinking could gain lots of respect from the elite class. The story of Min Wenshui was such an example. Min Wenshui was born as a commoner and later residing in the city Nanjing. His reputation spread when local tea drinkers found his expertise in discerning different tea and his skill in innovating new tea, named Min Laozi tea. Min’s ability and skill attracted many scholar-official tea connoisseurs, particularly those who were proud of their taste, sensual sensitivity, and elegant lifestyle. Both Zhang Dai and Li Rihua expressed their admiration of Min in their writings. Zhang had dedicated an essay to record his …show more content…
The appreciation of Min may also raise another issue. What did the elite class or people from wealthy scholar-official families really concerned about, the social status itself or “elegant taste/sensual sensitivity”? During the late-Ming period, the pursuit famous spring water embodied the aesthetic principle in scholar-officials’ daily life. From the Tang Dynasty to the late-Ming time, following the development of tea drinking, the selection of drinking water also experienced several changes, which represented that the tea drinkers’ sensual understandings became more and more sophisticated. Spring water remained as a cost-free object in the commercializing society of the late-Ming China, which differentiated it from other commodity goods. This feature of spring water also allowed it to possess a privileged position in scholar-official tea drinkers’ daily practices. Water delivery from the famous spring sites and traveling to the sites were both important ways for the scholar-official tea drinkers to fulfill their cultural imagination of the past; meanwhile, to build an identity with their contemporaries through the same understandings of things and